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In this paper I give empirical evidence for the hypothesis that there are no functional categories in early Swedish child language (up to approximately 3 years of age). claiming that utterances with at least a subject and a verb at this early stage of language development can be described within the limits of VP. Several properties of early Swedish are shown to follow from this hypothesis, including the lack of subordinate clauses in early Swedish and the fact that early Swedish is not a verb second language.

With respect to child English, Radford has claimed that there are no functional categories in early child syntax. This means that in English, children's grammer lacks both the C-projection and the I-projection. For Swedish, Platzack also hypothesizes that “there are no functional categories [like C or I] in early child syntax” (p. 107).

This article deals with extensions of Vygotsky's (1978) theory of learning in the zone of proximal development. First, affect is added as an additional prerequisite Wertsch's (1979) extended version of it. Then, learning in the zone of proximal development is applied to communicative development. Finally, four main levels in the development from interindividual to intraindividual functioning of communication in the child are distinguished and exemplified.

The recent upsurge of attention to Vygotsky's writings in developmental psychology, with their welcome focus on the role of the adult, on interaction and on the connection between communication and cognition constitutes a healthy redress to the Piagetian focus on the autonomous child operating in a world of things and actions rather than a world of people and relationships. In light of the corrective potential of Vygotskian ideas, it is not surprising that they have been embraced widely. Unfortunately, despite the initial appeal of central Vygotskian notions like the zone of proximal development, the intraindividual recapitulation of interindividual processes and the use of language as mediational means, it is very hard to take these notions beyond the status of slogan to the status of explanatory concept. A valuable contribution made by Junefelt in her article “The zone of proximal development and communicative development” is to give concrete examples of how these Vygotskian notions can help us understand a particular domain of development — communication.

This article concentrates on the continual sequence of sound acquisition process in individual subjects. The basic material is taken from three longitudinal studies regarding three Latvian-learning (monolingual) children; additional observations were made of five other children. In spite of the fact that Latvian is rich in consonantal clusters, all children had difficulties in mastering them correctly: they tried to avoid them by omission of one or two consonants or by replacing them with other sounds. Even hypercorrect substitutions appeared. Medial clusters occurred much earlier than clusters in other positions, and final clusters several months before initial clusters. Similar observations in Czech children learning their mother-tongue point to some universal character of this phenomenon since consonantal clusters are absent in many world languages or are used in special positions, and they are among the first features which disappear in aphasia.

In her paper “The acquisition process of consonantal clusters in the child: some universal rules?”, Velta Rūķe-Draviņa focuses on one of the oldest and most persistent issues in language development—the degree to which order of acquisition is governed by universals. An alternative way of formulating her question is: does one do a better job of predicting features of child language acquisition from knowing about the specific language being learned or from knowing about characteristics of all the world's languages? Suppose the language to be learned makes frequent use of a structure that is relatively rare in the world's languages, and thus presumably highly marked? Will the child learn the structure in question early because of its importance in the target language, or late because of its markedness?

In a series of studies designed to examine children's mastery of the form/content distinction in spoken communication, the results indicated that such mastery is dependent on the particular task and test procedures. The results showed that preschoolers, at least in their fourth to fifth year, remember and recognize form and content aspects of their own delivered messages. and of their interlocutor's message as well for some types of tasks. However, relationships between different types of tasks were generally low. The hypothesis expressed by David Olson and his colleagues that experience with written texts might prompt the development of this skill, only received weak support. The general conclusion is that there is a range of tasks which may reveal awareness of the form/content distinction, which also make it possible for younger children to make the distinction. Put differently, there is not one form/content distinction in verbal communication, but several.

In her paper “Methodological reflections on studies of preschoolers' awareness of the form/content distinction, in spoken communication”, Lisbeth Hedelin again raises the long discussed and still murky issue of how children come to understand the distinction between what an utterance means and how exactly it is said. The form/content distinction is, of course, a central feature and defining property of natural languages. It is relevant to the basic grammatical demonstration of ambiguity, which is recurrently offered as evidence for a deep structure/surface structure distinction: “Visiting relatives can be tiresome” as one form with two content interpretations. It is also relevant to any notion of language as an effective communication system in which levels of directness can be manipulated in the service of politeness, and in which deniability is the prerogative of the language user: “It sure would be nice to have a beer in this heat” displays potential ambiguity of interpretation between request and comment —of quite a different sort from “visiting relatives”. The multiplicity of form/content distinctions is central to Hedelin's paper, which takes as a starting point the possibility that different tasks might reveal quite different levels of ability to deal with or display control over the basic notion that form and content do not map in a one-to-one way on to each other.

The Child Language Data Exchange System — CHILDES — is the largest child language archive in the world. The archive includes a wide range of languages covering both normal and abnormal populations. The database is freely accessible to the research community and the user is supported with guidelines for carrying out transcription work and software packages for the automatic analysis of transcriptions. The article provides a brief overview of the CHAT transcription notation and the CLAN programs that can be used to analyse transcripts written in CHAT format. Current drawbacks of the CHILDES system are discussed and some pointers to future developments higlighted.

It is evident that the Child Language Exchange System—CHILDES—will play a catalytic role in the study of first language acquisition. Plunkett rightly concludes that this system has the potential of bringing together work on first language acquisition from a wide range of theoretical and practical perspectives. The compilation of the CHILDES package, including a workbench with a set of computational tools, is an admirable achievement, which most certainly will have an impact on other branches in the study of language behaviour (e.g. discourse analysis, sociolinguistics).